the constant disappointment of eschatologists waiting eagerly for the end of the world

Somewhere in the Bible, it says something like "Nobody shall know the time of his coming" and it goes on about Armageddon being like a thief in the night. Which is a fucking horrible metaphor for anyone who's ever broken into a toolshed at one thirty on a sunny Spring afternoon to try to score some of the special medicine that only comes in rattling, drippy cylinders.

At least, the second part is. It's pretty self explanatory. One fried human nugget left in for a few cycles longer than recommended by Martha's Guide to Fryer Cooking plus one medium strength dirty ether hangover plus one moderately secured toolshed door equals a whole lot of what my dead grandmother calls "ruckus" when she can be bothered to talk to me.

The good news is, the guy who actually owns the critical tools of doomsday forbearance currently holding my ghoulish fixation has a real job, and probably wants to keep it, and so has no reason to be home right now and come charging out at me with a college regulation aluminum softball bat just because he has in his healthy, non-solvent-addled brain the perfectly reasonable suspicion that I am breaking some of his property in the attempt to deprive him of some of his other property.

Having no tools, I am forced to abandon my attempts to twist the cheap flap-type padlock bracket away from the reasonably sound plywood door. A sudden thought like a weak fart in a country bar causes me to connect the fact that the floor of the toolshed is trampled, matted, and heavily browned grass, and that the toolshed is in fact a simple balloon structure placed directly onto the ground. Even a wasted stick frame should be able to handle this, and one crouch, one fumble, and one pained extension of every muscle in my body later, the shed is overturned and the prize is mine.

Considering the immense noise that a toolshed makes when rotated 90 degrees from its optimal orientation, I decide to crawl back under the beautiful holly bushes and slink back the several blocks to my tenement.

If you ever take a good look at a city in the middle of what they call "urban renewal", "gentrification", or sometimes "kicking poor people out of their shitty blockhouses and building coffee shops where they used to inject smack into their eyeballs and carry broods far larger than the 2.1 average children per US household", you will notice something very startling. A few years into the effort it becomes very apparent that re-zoning only puts the sort of people who have immaculately geometric holly bushes and secure toolsheds that much closer to increasingly more hardscrabble and desperate poor people who are only looking to get fucked up on ether and its related compounds as well as whatever amount of aromatic compounds go along for the ride.

On one hand, my personal integrity demands that I not flip over prefabricated shelters at all, let alone for the sole purpose of rifling through and pilfering its contents. On the other hand, my personal integrity turns down the intensity, saturation, and contrast on its luminous messages on those occasions when I can both silence the guilt particular to petty crime, and I can at the same time get enough neurons to fire in sequence to remember this:

The longer I stay stuck inside this deteriorating meat shell, the less time I have to finish constructing the astral structures that may not be enough to stem the increasing flow of the angry damned and the spiritually disenfranchised.